


i'm missing things that i have done without

by brophigenia



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Adventuring, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gentle Sex, Happy Ending, Marriage, Married Sex, Oral Sex, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Finale, Rough Sex, Sailing, Storm's End, The Uncharted Lands, True Love, Unmarried Sex, and, basically imagine Arya as Westley and Gendry as Buttercup except really not at all like that, coming home, listen guys i just really need these two kids to make it work, ships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:16:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19129996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: “Okay.” She whispers, feeling like a surrender. “Okay, but that’s all. I won’t be the Lady of Storm’s End. I won’t be anything but Arya Stark.”(AKA, Gendry's second marriage proposal goes a lot better than the first, Arya still leaves on her ship bound for the great wide somewhere, and there are sexy results.)





	i'm missing things that i have done without

**Author's Note:**

> So I started writing this fic as soon as Gendry proposed. Literally. That very second. 
> 
> Comment and let's cry together about The Finale. 
> 
> Title from Comin' Home by Murder by Death

_i want to make love_ __  
_but my hair smells of war_  
_and running  
__and running_

_(Warsan Shire)_

_***_

_Marry me,_ he had said, and been upon his knees, offering her all that was his. All that he had not earned, had been _given_ by the Dragon Queen, who would take _everything_ from them. Who already _had_ taken everything from them; their home, their army, their _Jon._ And then she had legitimized Gendry, made him a _Baratheon,_ a prince of his dead House, made him into something that Arya could hardly recognize. He’d been _Gendry_ for as long as she’d been _Arya,_ someone to think of in the very darkest moments of the night, someone constant, someone _living,_ someone who did not fill her mouth with sorrow like blood or parch her for vengeance like days in the desert. And now he was _Gendry Baratheon,_ someone she did not know all of the inches of, all of the calluses.

(Arya _hated_ Daenerys Stormborn for many things, but most of all for making Gendry into something she could not possess, nor even pretend to.)

 _Marry me,_ he had said, but she could not then and could not now, because her mouth yet tasted of vengeance and her soul would never be still. She had run for so far and so long that being confined to one place made her dizzy, even if that place was named _Winterfell_ and all the corpses rotting in its cellars were corpses of her own blood _._

She’d become a ghost in Harrenhal and had never come alive again, not really. She’d been a ghost and then she’d been Nobody, and by the time she’d been able to shape the words _Arya Stark_ they felt clumsy, like a bad disguise, no matter how often she said them.

(She’d still thought of Gendry, though; as a ghost and as Nobody and as Arya, shakily relearning herself.)

The first time she comes to Storm’s End after the Dragon Queen dies, it’s raining and her entry into his stronghold is too-easy. Easy enough to frighten her, beneath all the cold top layers that do not frighten about anything at all. Slips past his bannermen and his guards, slips up to his solar where he clearly feels out of place, if the stolid bare decor is to be believed.

He’s mostly-asleep in a chair by the banked fire, worn-out with his head leant back and his shoulders slumped. He looks soft and exhausted, but the line of his jaw is still knife-sharp. She still wants to put her teeth to it.

“Your guards are shite.” She says; he startles, eyes flying open and hand flying to his empty belt. So _stupid._ Not even a dagger on hand, and him the bloody newly-legitimized Lord of Storm’s End. It makes her furious, makes her cheeks heat. He looks at her all soft, like she is breaking his heart but he wouldn’t send her away for all the jewels and gold in Essos.

(Jon had looked at the Targaryen that way. Look at how well _that_ turned out. Perhaps it was a bastard’s fate, to want something so fiercely even if it hurt you. To love something _completely,_ even its teeth. Even its fire.)

“Milady,” he says, and raises up his chin, fighting some kind of fond grin. She wants to hold a knife to his throat, bared to her gaze. Wants to shake him. Wants to line up each and every one of the men in his Round Hall and threaten their lives and their very _souls_ if they allow any harm to come to him.

“I’m not your lady,” she retorts, and stalks restlessly from one side of the room to the other, eyeing him the whole time, cagey as a rabid wolf. As Nymeria in a silk dress. “You should’ve married a lady by now. A _real_ lady.” She lectures him, and unconsciously fingers the hilt of her dagger. _She_ is armed, always. He knows better than to let his guard down. The war may be over, but the game of thrones is still being played.

(Always.)

“Well, the only _real lady_ I want to marry won’t have me, so.” He says cheekily, though his eyes never leave her, and there is a tightness in his finely-hewn jaw that belies the glib tone of his words. All of a sudden it’s imperative she touch him, get her hands upon him and his upon her.

“Stupid,” she breathes into his mouth, settling astride his thighs in her boiled leathers and drab black woolens, lithe and small beneath his hands, his face cupped like something precious in hers. “You ought to marry an Ashford, or a Royce, or a Redwyne.” The names taste like acid in her mouth, but she can’t make herself _stop._ “A fucking Tallhart, their daughters are plentiful enough, if you want a Northerner _that badly—“_

He groans, because as she speaks she rocks her hips, grinds herself against him. “I’ll have a Stark, or none at all.” He tells her, and distracts her by sucking at the tender spot beneath her left ear so she doesn’t stiffen up and get frozen like the icicles dripping from every eave in Winterfell at the reminder of his ill-received proposal. Worse still, so she doesn’t make any jokes about his chances with Sansa, whose very name makes his balls draw up for fear of frostbite. It works, and she melts up like something approaching springtime. Still steel beneath the ice. He thinks of the comparison a little more, thinks the word _dripping,_ and groans again, this time into her mouth, twining his rough fingers in her short hair.

They’re getting better at this, Arya notes, each time they lie together. She’s quicker to come this time, and the movement of her hips seems even more natural than it did the first time she took him inside of her and rode out their pleasures. He’s not so shy about touching her, about putting pressure above where they’re joined and rubbing circles around her teats with his calloused thumbs. It feels good, all of it— she looks into his eyes and doesn’t let him look away. Knows it’s selfish, but wants to be the only one he thinks of, when he feels this way.

That’s the first time, and she leaves him with a firm, toothsome kiss, stopping on her way out to hold a blade to the throat of his Master-at-Arms, threatening him with all the horrors she can conjure up if he allows anything to happen to the new Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.

(There are many horrors she can conjure up, as easily as the Red Witch might’ve with her magic, and thrice as bloody.)

Arya roams the woods and the towns and the seas, sends ravens to Sansa and Bran at Winterfell, tries to forget the gaping wound in her chest where the rest of her family _should_ be and is not. Tries to keep herself from making for the cell that Jon rots in, breaking him out. Tries not to see Gendry in every dark-haired man she meets, and mostly succeeds, except on nights when she’s so exhausted that every single one of her limbs feels too heavy to lift and she thinks of the featherbed he no doubt is enjoying in the lord’s chambers built in Storm’s End’s colossal tower.

(She wonders if he’s found a bride yet, for surely he must marry, and soon; she wonders if the maid is like Sansa had been as a girl, flaxen-haired and gowned in silks and always fucking giggling. She wonders if that would be better or worse than a maid somber and still; if it would be easier to see Gendry replace her with a girl who is her opposite or one who is as near an approximation of her as he can find.)

The second time she finds herself at Storm’s End, it’s almost an accident. A lead on a slaving ring brings her to Summerhall, and by the time she’s done slitting the throats of the slavers and releasing their stolen children she’s tired to her marrow. Tired enough that she cannot come up with a good enough reason _not_ to go through Grandview, though each step her horse takes is agony on her tired bones.

He’s abed, this time, in that tower room atop his feather mattress that she’d imagined so many long and cold nights.

He doesn’t ask where she’s come from, only watches her strip off her rain-sodden clothes and opens his arms for her to crawl into.

“I was wrong,” he murmurs, into her hair, when they’ve finished fucking and he’s somehow gotten her to lay still enough that he can hold her fast in that fine featherbed.

“What a shock,” she retorts dryly, fighting sleep. He is silent at her back except for his breathing, but her curiosity and her exhaustion make her ask. She is so weak around him. “About _what?”_

His arms tighten around her, biceps bulging. He is so strong. It makes her cunt throb again, makes something dark in her want to make him hold her _tighter,_ with all his strength. He could crush her ribcage in his two massive hands. She could thrash and thrash and still not be able to escape, not like this with her dagger discarded on the floor and Needle further away still. She might blind him before she succumbed to death, but not kill him. Gruesome, it is, and intoxicating.

“I don’t care if you’re a lady or not.” He confesses, and rolls her so he can look in her eyes, soppy and true. It makes her throat hurt to look at him. He’s so handsome. A man grown. The Lord of Storm’s End.

“Well, that’s—“ she begins, flustered beneath her implacable calm mask, but he cuts her off.

“I just love you, Arya Stark. I just want you to be my wife.” And he’s so _serious,_ is the thing. So serious. So steadfast. Her bullheaded smith, grown into a warrior and a lord and a man when she stayed a child and a ghost, it feels like.

(But she never feels more like a _woman_ than she does when she is with him; never feels more aware of herself as something more than a tool for destruction. She is Needle, a slim-bladed sword, good for nothing but summoning death, until she is around him; in his presence she is _Arya,_ a woman grown, the daughter of a great lord and lady, the sister of kings, the sister of a queen.)

“Okay.” She whispers, feeling like a surrender. “Okay, but that’s all. I won’t be the Lady of Storm’s End. I won’t be anything but Arya Stark.” _Don't ask me to be anything but Arya Stark,_ she wants to beg, but knows he hears her unspoken words as well as the spoken ones.

He kisses her, draws her naked from the bed and goes rooting around for a pair of robes for them to don, loose things that tie on and leave them bearing identical swaths of sternum, though on her the thing seems much more a gown than on him, with his feet bare and his calves exposed. They’re quite shapely, Gendry’s legs. She’d not think it about anyone else. Legs were legs, except for when they were attached to Gendry _bloody_ Baratheon.

The Maester is called Jurne, and his cell is at the very top of the great tower. He’s an old man, with a hawkish beak of a nose and eyes perpetually squinting; he opens the door to his cell in an old nightshirt that shows his spindly legs and spidery hands.

“My lord,” he says with a short, creaky bow, joints popping and arthritic. He doesn’t seem to have been woken from any kind of sleep, though it’s the middle of the night. Over his shoulder, Arya can see through the window that a thunderstorm is raging over the ses. “Can I help you?”

“I’d like to be married, Maester Jurne.” Gendry says, and with his arm about her waist it is not a mystery as to the intended bride, however much Jurne peers around them both, as if they’ve hidden some _other_ future Lady Baratheon a half-dozen steps down.

The Septon is far more ferocious about being woken from his slumber, but after Gendry straightens and gives him the sort of look that Arya had seen before upon King Robert’s face, when he wasn’t knee-deep in his cups, he bows and scrapes and marries them in the sept, surrounded by statues of the Mother, Father, Maiden, Crone, Smith, Warrior, and Stranger. Gendry kisses her and lays a (threadbare and old-fashioned) stag-symboled cloak around her shoulders and so she is married, become Lady Paramount of the Stormlands. Technically.

 _Dear Sansa,_ she thinks with no small amount of hysteria, composing her next letter in her mind, _I’ve stopped in for a fuck and become Lady Baratheon. Please advise._ She thinks of her sister reading such a letter in their father’s old solar and fights down a fluttering noise in her throat that might be either a sob, giggle, or scream.

Gendry swallows the noise when it tries to come back up later, in his chamber again, already wet between the legs with his spend from before and yet spreading her thighs again for it, calculating how long she’s got before she’ll have to gulp down the Moon Tea she carries in a pouch on her belt just in case.

“Fuck me like you _mean it,”_ she hisses into his ear when he sinks into her all soft and _tender,_ unbearable when she can _feel_ the potential in his limbs, when she can touch his forearms and _feel_ the coiled violence in them. She is a wolf. She is a _wolf,_ no matter what is stitched on the cloak beneath her back. “You _bastard.”_ It stirs him, somewhere down low, in the baseborn parts. He puts his back into it, then, and she howls like a direwolf bitch in heat for it, scratching and writhing.

It’s good. It’s _so good,_ even with Gendry’s lips so soft on her brow, even when he murmurs _Arya Arya my sweet wife my wife my wife Arya Arya Arya_ against the sweat-soaked strands of her hair. It takes so long to come but it feels like he’s yanked it straight out from between her legs when she does, feels like her guts have been ripped out, so good it blacks her vision for a long moment.

Sleep comes easily then, and when she wakes she puts her leathers back on and straps on her sword and leaves him sleeping on his stomach with the evidence of their union scoured in long scratches on his bare back, mouth open and snores soft.

From there it’s madness; she writes no letters and breathes not a single word of any of it, because then there is the _trial,_ if that is what it ought to be called when a dozen or more stuffy lords and ladies sit around a tent dispassionately drinking wine and blinking disdainfully at anyone who seems to take the whole thing seriously.

(Sansa is Winter itself, seeming not to feel the oppressive heat in her furs and leather, and not for the first time Arya wonders what _exactly_ had been done to her sister, the years they’d been apart.)

She walks away from it all with her hands shaking, tucked at her sides, truly the sister of a king and a queen, untethered and unbound. _Free._

She finds Gendry consulting with one of his men, flashing a smile and looking at home amongst them, so handsome with his hair cropped short. Handsomer than Robert or Stannis or even Renly, and Arya would fight anyone who tried to argue otherwise. Fight for her husband’s honor. How ludicrous. How _glorious._

He looks up and meets her eyes across the room; she raises her chin and doesn’t care how bold she looks, how lustful in the twist of her lips. What cares has she now? Who might reproach her? She is Arya Stark.

He puts his hands around her thighs and holds them open for his _mouth,_ the door barely closed behind them before he’s giving her the Lord’s Kiss, gods and men be damned, her fingers scrabbling for purchase in his too-short hair and her vision alight with starbursts. He’s clumsy enough at it that she knows he’s never done it before and that’s almost as sweet as the determined way he _sucks_ at her, vulgar and delicious, as if she were drenched in Arbor Gold and not her own slick.

“I’m going away—“ she gasps, breath hitching, hiding her face into her hands, giving up on holding him by the hair to try and smother her screams enough that his men won’t hear them. “Sailing off, going to explore the seas, and so the joke’s on you, really, because— _oh gods—“_ she loses her train of thought and shakes apart under his mouth instead of trying to save herself some heartbreak by suggesting a decree of dissolution before he does it, himself.

“What were y’trying to say before?” Gendry mumbles tiredly, stubble scraping her nipple in a way that makes her leg twitch violently as his jaw works, face smashed into her left armpit. His breath tickles the hair there in a way both strange and strangely pleasant.

“Nothing.” She sighs, resigned, and lets herself fall asleep after she makes sure her dagger is within arm’s reach, should assassins sneak in through the windows in the dead of night. “You _fucker.”_ Gendry snores in answer.

(She falls asleep smiling, almost.)

The Uncharted Lands are… they are _everything,_ jungles thick and towers soaring, people speaking melodic languages that sound like singing, murders so artfully done that they, too, are beautiful, blades sharper than anything she’s ever seen before and blood seeping into fabrics softer than silk, staining floors that sparkle with veins of gold brighter than _anything_ beneath Casterly Rock.

They are _everything,_ and she finds joy and rage and wonder within them, spends weeks wandering Facelessly through crowds, wearing a new face every other day, learning the culture and the language and the darkness, though no matter whose face she wears she always dreams of snow and of _Gendry,_ collecting scraps of metal he’d never worked with before and a little toy bull that really _moves,_ tucking these things away into her haversack without much thought, until she comes upon a circlet of metal so black it seems to swallow the light around it. A ring. A thing not pointless, not thoughtless.

She barters for it, strings it on a chain and wears it next to her heart. Sometimes, when she stands before sword-wielding sultans and empresses as deadly as vipers (because the Wheel turns everywhere, and there is only one god, no matter how many faces he wears, after all) she wonders if she will live long enough to give it to him. Sometimes, when she’s found something that fills her so completely with joyful delight, something that makes her feel like a child again, unstained and far away from her ghosts, she wonders if she will go back to him at all.

Three years. It is a lifetime. Her face changes, her _true_ face, and so does her body, though she grows no taller in the intervening years between _nineteen_ and _twenty-two._

Her dreams remain unchanged, and the weight strung round her neck. Snow, and Gendry, and a wedding ring blacker than even the sky during the Long Night had been, much too large for her small fingers.

She’s in the crow’s nest, watching, when they come within sighting distance of Westeros, one arm holding herself steady, looped around the mast, and the other holding her spyglass, the same one Bran had pressed into her hand before she’d left in the ship her sister had built, with its great direwolf figurehead and sigiled sails. It was not emblazoned with their house’s toothsome beast but instead a noble-looking many-pronged stag. No other words had been needed.

They come into King’s Landing, because as much as Arya might _want_ to, she cannot immediately sail into Shipbreaker Bay and mount Gendry upon its docks. It’s a living thing, her lust. She’d gone three years without thinking of his cock overmuch, content with her fingers and her memories on the rare night that the need _was_ stirring in her, but that had all changed in the weeks she’d been at sea, sailing back to him. With each passing day she’d been madder for it, and as soon as her boots alight onto the docks at Blackwater Bay she can practically _smell him,_ the forge’s fires and the lye-heavy soap he favored even as Lord Paramount of the Stormlands and his _sweat,_ salty and hardwon.

The thought of him is a wind upon her back, making her distracted and sharp in turns as she presents herself in the rebuilt Red Keep, now called the People’s Keep. Charming, equitable, all of that, with the banners of each and every House in the Six Kingdoms hung upon the walls. Her brother _is_ taller, unfairly, settled upon his rather plain throne with his legs strapped together so he might balance himself better, not wrapped up in furs to hide his broken body away. He is taller and yet still _Bran,_ or at least the Bran-shaped being she’d left him as three years ago, the Three-Eyed Raven with her brother’s smile, a thing rather than any she saw in the jungles and oases in the Uncharted Lands.

She tells of her journeys, of the people she’s met and the way they live, of the good and the bad. Tyrion’s eyes become sharper and sharper as she speaks, and once she’s done he is almost visibly _vibrating_ with wanderlust. It must choke him. The thought is pleasant; he may be her brother’s Hand, but he was still a Lannister, and she still awoke some mornings chanting her list, no matter where she was, no matter what she had seen.  

When she is done with the public spectacle, the trotting-out of trunks chock full of gauzy fabrics and carts piled with strange rocks and metals and a full menagerie of those moving toys, there is the private one to attend to.

“Bran.” She says when they are alone, or as alone as they will ever be, with his Small Council all sitting around like fat, exotic birds, with the exception of Brienne, who was absent, training her latest recruits. The Payne boy sat in her place, peering at her like she had gold tits or something.

“Arya.” Bran responds, and his mouth twitches a bit into something approaching a smile. “Do you still have the spyglass I gave you?” He asks lightly, though it is plainly strapped to her belt.

“I do.” She says anyway, that wind at her back blowing so strongly she’s having trouble keeping her knees from buckling. “It needs repairs, though.” She hears herself say, not sly like Sansa might say it but as woodenly transparent as Jon might be, trying to make an insinuation with his Northern subtlety.

“I hear that there is a master optician in Grandview.” Bran says mildly. “You might see him about it.”

Arya grins at him, fierce and thankful, and presses a kiss to his cheek before she goes, barely remembering to duck a bow at the door, leaving the Small Council blinking in her wake

It takes no time at all to sail her way to Storm’s End in a borrowed (commandeered) rig, small enough to be easy to maneuver by herself and fast as the wind itself. Her heart thunders in her chest with each wave that slaps against the stern, her cheeks aching from how she wants to grin, out here in the water with no one to see.

The tower is as tall as she remembers, with no windows facing the sea, and she thinks of scaling it, coming in through the window like some Wildling to steal away the Lord of the castle.

In the end, she hardly remembers how she finds herself in Gendry’s chambers, only that she _does._ She can smell herself, briny like the sea and sweaty like a stableboy. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, because Gendry is in the bed and he is alone, sleeping on the left side of the bed with his arm stretched out towards the right like he’s reaching out for someone who isn’t there.

(Like he’s dreaming of her.)

“Gendry,” she whispers, kneeling on the right side of the mattress and taking up his grasping hand, rubbing his knuckles with all the gentleness she can muster, which is not much but more than it had been when she’d left him sleeping in a guest chamber at King’s Landing. “Wake up.” He snuffles, mouth working as he follows her bidding and wakes up, only a bit.

“Hullo, Wife.” Gendry mumbles, more-than-mostly asleep, eyes slotted barely open. She waits for a breath, and then two, and on the third he goes tense, seeming to realize what is going on. He’s so stupid. A great big lump of uselessness. She loves him so terribly that her throat aches.

With a yank of their joined hands and a panther-like roll of his long limbs she’s beneath him, his eyes bluer than they have any right to be. “Hullo, Wife.” He repeats, gaze intent. Her legs are tangled with his, and she throbs with the press of his thigh against her cunt. It’s too much, and not enough, and she could cut his throat but she’d much rather kiss him, and so she does, clumsy and half-forgetting _how._

The chain with the ring on it pools against her throat, tangling in her hair, grown too-long, brushing past her shoulders and as unmanageable as ever, wanting cutting. It takes some doing to free the ring from the chain and her hair while not breaking the kiss, but she manages it somehow. Gendry is wearing a bloody _nightgown._ He smells like the forge, still. She wonders if he has to catch time before the fires of the smith in residence or if he’s got his own workshop, if maybe he handles some the ironwork that the castle needs doing.

It takes some doing to slip the ring onto his left hand, but she manages that, too. “Got this for you,” she tells him, without pulling her mouth from his. Their teeth clack together painfully, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about anything but freeing herself from her trousers, dragging his _nightgown_ up high enough to get at his cock.

“Welcome home,” he says, as he thrusts inside of her, needy and not careful about it. She likes that. Likes that she can tell how badly he’s wanted this, so desperate for her there can have been no one else in this bed with him.

She’ll leave again, eventually, she knows. The _Catelyn_ is still waiting in Blackwater Bay, and more undiscovered territory waits beyond the borders of where she’d already explored. It calls for her, the ship and the promise of adventure both, but for now that call is easy to smother, with her husband between her legs and the featherbed beneath her travel-worn body.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
